ADVENTURES IN WRITING! Operating from Northern Indiana, this blog will cover aspects of culture with a bent on humor and the relentless belittling of the mainstream media, politics, and the syphilitic GOP (both major parties). News analysis happens. Put on your adult diapers, this gwine'-a'-be a bourgeois hoot. Some much needed hilarity for working class North Americans and international readers. I'm the part of this human world that bites back. Let's roll.

Thursday, August 01, 2013

What was the DC Madam case about?

With
the
blessed passing of yet another election cycle, we might reflect on
another one from
the recent past which resulted in a significant routing of the GOP by
the
Democrats: the deeply contentious 2006 national midterms. There's at
least one major political sex scandal that takes down a significant
politician in the United States every election cycle, generally
speaking, two years, with overlap for higher office.

After
the fall of the Director of the CIA at the hands of the surveillance
state, we might reflect on the DC Madam case and look at the same themes
and actions at play.

Bil…
yes, I saw it. This further supports my belief that escort and adult services –
which cater to powerful and influential clients – are being used as the new
"hunting grounds" in American politics. –Jeane PS if interested, I
will be on Geraldo and Coast to Coast Radio (10:30pm PDT)
tonight. Newsweek also has done a piece on me, that is coming out in
Monday's edition. It should be available online, by late tonight/tomorrow.

Yet, it appears that the GOP practically brought their own scandal to the attention of the American public.
This kind of calculated stupidity is completely in character for them. I
walked away from this train wreck a few days after this email.This all began with a leak by federal prosecutors to Bill Bastone and the Smoking Gun, they wanted it out there.

Why
do this?
Damage control knowing that you can redefine a problem. 2006 had a lot
to do with corruption, how much the public will take of it, and
damage control rather than the willingness to change or to take
responsibility
like adults. There are no adults, don’t kid yourself. You look at events
differently once you’ve been on the inside of them. Whether others like
it or
not, Jeane allowed me to take in a lot for a purpose. She invited me to
sneak a
peek behind the curtain, and indeed, some impotent clowns resembling the
Wizard
of Oz were incompetently pulling levers that affect people’s lives,
tripping, falling
over each other, and they were just as blunderingly human and frail as I
expected
them to be. What the case was about is right in front of your eyes,
every day,
therefore invisible. It wasn’t a mistake that defense and intelligence
technology contractor SAIC and the CPU giant Qualcomm were in Jeane’s
phone
records, or that they were visiting my website any more than it was that
so
many arrows pointed to San Diego and numerous military personnel, many
of them officers. It wasn’t coincidence that put Lockheed
Martin in her phone bills for her escort service, that a World Bank
executive
was in them, that a major league GOP operative like Jack Burkman was
too, and
there were many others, others I haven’t even included in my account of
what I
believe happened and what the case meant. Judge Kessler saw no
coincidences when she granted Jeane subpoena power over the intelligence
community.

This was a
tale of partisan politics and statism, but also where the lines blur in those constructs,
because interests overlap, making for the strangest bedfellows of all. Why the
2006 midterms? I believe this election is the key to understanding why an
interim-appointed U.S. Attorney named Jeffrey A. Taylor decided to move on
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the press-dubbed “DC Madam,” only one month after she’d
shuttered her escort service. I’m assuming here that someone tipped her off. Why waste
millions on a small escort service like that? This was first of all about damage
control for the part of the public that can be reached when presented with
stupid things like facts and corroborated evidence, empiricism, stuff that's not entertainment. Without
wanting to, I have no faith in the rank-and-file of either major party, and I
think Palfrey’s own apathy about politics and her ignorance of it was
instrumental in her undoing, word to the wise. Being the one-eyed man in the
kingdom of the blind doesn’t elevate you to the throne.

She knew some significant things about her predicament and her place,
but clearly, not enough. What still surprises me is that before I brought the
timing of the search of the Vallejo residence to her attention, she, her
counsel, and others assisting her, hadn’t considered it—not even journalists
she was encountering were expressing their observations of this. For an openly partisan Republican
prosecutor to move on a suspect who, perhaps unknowingly, holds information damaging
to his party and other related interests, is an unmistakable political act.
Breaking the law to achieve damage control and to protect the defense and
intelligence contracting game was implicit to their theater and the media was
only too happy to play along.

Not
even a
nearly unprecedented economic crisis was going to overcome the racist
backlash
over the 2008 election of Barack Obama and it temporarily breathed new
life
into an ashen GOP, perhaps for the final time, since it was coming from a
demographic of angry, aging white Americans whose political significance
has
been rapidly eroding over the last few decades. In their bigotry, they
fear this massive influx of Hispanic refugees,
most of them desperate Mexicans fleeing social chaos, generations of
poverty, the militarization
of the drug war, corrupt federales, goons, police, the cartels, and
enslavement
in the maquiladora factories that line the Free Trade Zone along the
border,
and now, private security, the CIA and drones. Such a happy family
relationship
between nations brought the dictator Porfirio Diaz to remark, “Poor
Mexico, so
far from God, and so close to the United States.” Yet, thanks to this
ruthless
repression and exploitation, there were some unexpected results: a new
dynamic where Latin
Americans are now heading towards being the future of politics, and
possibly
the labor movement, in the United States. And with this realization
among the nativist rabble element came the inevitable Know-nothing
reaction of hounding
immigrants, which, like lynching, is a time-honored American tradition.
Does
the public ever truly learn? Which one would that be in a divided
nation when these racists are becoming the minority? They're also the
staggering idiots who tolerate an emergent police state and runaway
defense spending while at the same time painting themselves inaccurately
as rebels. That's called a fool. This is why it wasn't surprising to me
that these same people--if you want to call them that--run to
conspiracy theories that never truly touch on those power centers.
Chasing ghosts and being ineffectual is the safest thing in the world.
2006 wasn't especially different from now.

At this, the
halfway mark of the second and unfortunate term of George W. Bush, when the
future Tea Party members were cheering the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and police state
tactics in the war on terror, Republican Party officeholders were paying the
price for more skeletons in their closet than the Marquis de Sade or Al Capone.
The litany of corrupt acts, antisocial behaviors, and general high weirdness,
was widespread enough in their elected ranks to warrant decades of inquiries,
yet, no, according to President Obama, we must “continue to look forward,”
sounding as much like Scarface as the Republicans. Of great note, one of the
cappers that went over the line was Florida congressman Mark Foley, who was
accused of pedophilia. This is all about breaking the law and surviving through
until the next ever-tightening election cycle. Controlling the DOJ never hurts.
Besides, you can always fire your Attorney General and appoint another one the
public can grow to hate as an arch-criminal the more they get to know about them. Almost a year
earlier the profoundly illegal warrantless wiretapping program that bypassed
the judicial oversight of the FISA court (housed at the DOJ, and I suspect they
knew), initiated by the White House, was no longer being sat on by the traditionally
submissive New York Times. (They had done this for a full year, so that the
2004 elections could pass by safely for the GOP, at least regarding that
particular skeleton.)

You
know that
there’s a political crisis going on when the culture of politics has
shifted so
far to the right, that all the partisan hacks can talk about is a
non-existent
center. Most of what you’re going to be hearing from the official
channels when a
system ossifies is unbridled crap and lies, more obfuscations, apologies
to
power, ignoring the growing herd of elephants (the only one), until this
game no
longer works. Rather
than looking at all of what we’re learning about rampant corruption as
an
excuse to cop-out (pun very much intended) and run to the temporary
safety of
jaded apathy, we should be glad that we know about these crimes at all,
because
knowledge really is power. But then the problem is that you’re forced to
decide
to do something about it. I made that decision getting involved in this
case,
hoping that I could bear witness to history and to accumulate whatever
materials I could for the record. I was successful in that endeavor. Too
often, the residue of events is lost to the ages. Collecting these
materials was done so that the information could
be out there and the public has the option to discover, more generally,
how the
private sector and government collude, and I've put it out there, with
more to come.

An
incredible effort was mounted to
neutralize the destructive potential of what the charges against the
late Ms.
Palfrey were really about. To re-frame a story, and by doing so,
redefining it, is a common
practice in, ours, the most propagandized modern society outside of the
former Soviet
Union and China under Mao. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." This is
why corrupt government contractors need to operate in the dark,
and that’s what the DC Madam case, a branch of Hookergate, was about: to
hide
their criminal behavior and bury the evidence of their much greater
crimes.
When you keep raising this glaring discrepancy between how Palfrey was
treated
under the law on the one hand and how her privileged clients were on the
other,
and it’s never addressed in any substantial sense by government
prosecutors, career spokesmen like P.J. Crowley, those clients like
Senator Vitter, law
enforcement, the hierarchy at the DOJ, you begin to realize the fix is
in. Mind you, this was being said by many of
us during the proceedings very loudly, and to no avail, because the
mainstream
press did its best to let it die by its own hand, and I mean that
literally,
because they also knew that Jeane was suicidally inclined. Brecht
couldn't have dreamed this nightmare up. That's not murder, it's willful
negligence

There
had been
a very serious scandal in 2006—one of many—that eventually fizzled-out
named
“Hookergate,” the standard cigar and hooker parties that are held in and
around
the Beltway for hungry contractors, to obtain coveted, high dollar jobs
and assuage the seething addictions of sociopath Republican horndogs (as
opposed to
Democratic ones) with a taste for the high life on your dime. Yes, this is all about the war on terror and the moronic,
runaway militarization of America, the biggest buyer of unnecessary, clunky
military hardware in the entire world, six hundred times the spending in this
area than of all the other nations of the world combined. That’s pretty stupid—nay—exceptional. We not only have the right
to blow our balls off in this manner, but we still somehow have the right to
speak about it thanks to a historical accident that began during the Colonial
period, freedom of speech and the press. Things working out will never be good
enough for the species. In our meanness and selfish tendencies that have been
fostered into the emotional equivalents of plutonium, another poison we’ve
refined, so as to illustrate our collective wretchedness, we have contaminated
the world with our greed. From the moral rot of John Jacob Astor, to the senseless greed of
the speculator Jay Gould, America’s first millionaires, on down to the Robber
Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, men who childish fools have
emulated ever since, we compromised with the bad guys and lost our way long ago
as a nation, and we’re finally running out of road for the last time. This is
our last chance. All of this is what the DC Madam case was about, the
culmination of generations of baseness and barbarity. Either this is the
beginning, the end, or both, but we’ve undoubtedly come full circle, which is rarely
a good sign for the little people out there, the rest of us out here in television land.

This has
happened before. Our out of control defense spending is doing to American
democracy what it did to that system in Athens, first, by bankrupting their
Treasury, then the inevitable collapse into anarchy and dictatorship, wrought
by irrational military adventurism. Ask the Greeks how long it’s taken to come
back from that one. And, so today, we have a similar situation in place thanks
to the same kinds of criminals bent on power at any cost: a crisis on several
fundamental levels—political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental.
Not so long after Jeane died I conveyed to her former counselor Montgomery
Blair Sibley that she may as well have stayed alive since, what with the
encroaching economic catastrophe, she could have walked out of prison once
there was no money to house her anymore (it elicited no response). What was the
DC Madam case about? The fall of America by militarized self-immolation and general greed, nihilism.